I’ll get my coat.

Good idea, it gets chilly after sunset this time of year

Walkie talkie watch

Full perm Wig

Red LED light

Leather jacket

Chest wig

On a rather dull note its black trim all over the car to replace chrome highlights from factory 🙁  I rather wish it was the Knightrider kits tbh

is the night kit a sleepy bag and a cuddly toy?

And a self heating beaker of hot-chocolate?

I hope it is…

DrP

Ok, as a public service, I’ll ask them to add night kit…I’ll let you know what I get 🙂

If the car is 18 months old then more likely than not the paint work will be knackered anyway as most people seem to use a sponge and bucket or get the car destroyed at a drive through.

Only one might be worth considering is if your tyres are odd sizes as these can be silly money per corner.

Turned down LifeShine, they fiddled some numbers and gave it to me anyway as they needed to hit some target. Probably bumped my trade-in value to cover it. Well at least they did something and gave me the zip case with all the products.

Some sort of ceramic sealant, it’s basically poncy long lasting car wax. And TBH I’d not trust a dealer to apply it properly as it requires the car to be absolutely clean. Washed, dried, clay bared, bug/tar remover, machine polished and then ceramic wax sort of clean. Not just passed to the apprentice, jet washed and the wax applied. If you really want it, either do some googling and DIY it or pay a detailer.

Took them half an hour, so I doubt they did it properly. Idiots put it on the windscreen, first time I used the wipers it smeared terribly and I genuinely couldn’t see anything, bloody dangerous this was at 50mph. Hard to get off and had to replace the wipers too.

If the car is 18 months old then more likely than not the paint work will be knackered anyway as most people seem to use a sponge and bucket or get the car destroyed at a drive through.

TBF, unless you are obsessed, people don’t really care – I like my cars but I still just wash them with a bucket and sponge – it’s a lump of metal, not your first-born.

Fundamentally the car isn’t really the product: the finance and all the added crap is. The bulk of the sales guy’s commission is based off the extras they can flog you.

I meant to comment on this earlier and forgot.

I used to do support for a largish mail-order computer retailer. To protect the guilty let’s call them Crime Computers. This was absolutely my experience from talking to the Sales bods. They got bog all commission from selling PCs because fundamentally if the phone rang it was someone calling to buy a computer. They earned it from what was euphemistically called “value-added” sales (how common a term that is outside of Crime I don’t know). Mouse mats; dozens and dozens of floppy disks to make “backups” which were basically reinstallation media for all the apps; keyboard dust cover; and on and on it went.

Once you knew about this, it became blatantly obvious in the likes of Currys/Dixons ‘hard sell’ days (remember when getting to the other end of the store was like playing Pac-Man, suddenly ducking down a side aisle as Blinky and Clyde were trying to pincer you?) “Would you like the extended warranty for [price]?” No thanks. “But what if it fails in 18 months?” You think it’s likely to fail in 18 months? Oh, I’ve changed my mind then, I don’t want it. “Oh, well, no, of course not!” Then what do I need a warranty for?

When I bought my first mobile phone in 1999 he really, really wanted to upsell a carry case and a bunch of other crap and I really, really didn’t want to buy it. He was Old School Salesman pushy and wouldn’t take no for an answer to a point where I went “you know what, **** it, if you’re not going to listen to me then I don’t want it.” I stood up and made for the door. He came chasing after me begging me to reconsider. I said, “tell you what, throw in the case etc for free and you’ve got a deal.” He got his commission, I got some free tat.

I have no time for it. I understand that they have little choice in having to offer it to you, but if they’re going to play silly bastards after I’ve declined because they think I’m daft then hold my beer.

Oh yeah, the “Clearly Fresh Out Of Salesbastard Training” little snot at Mazda I dealt with not all that long ago.

I rang them enquiring about a car, stock and lead times. “Can we just take some details?” Ugh, whatever, ‘block’ is a thing, here’s my email. Cougar, yes yes, I know, it wasn’t hilarious in like 1989 when I created the address. We had a bit of a chat, I booked a test drive, went to the dealer.

I wanted to just go for a spin but he was on rails. Insisted on having a conversation first, he starts asking me about big cats and telling me what his favourite was, cat facts like which the biggest one was, and all sorts of other unrelated nonsense.

“Now, let me show you the car. Look at the sleek lines on the headlight” and all that baloney like a walking marketing brochure. Yes yes, I know what it looks like. I was getting increasingly impatient and sarcastic with him but there was no stopping him from giving me a full walkaround. I was practically going “give me the ****ing keys” by the time we finally got inside one.

I wasn’t allowed to take my partner with me (“because Covid” despite it being fine at every other dealership) which rendered a test drive kinda useless as she was going to be the main driver. He had to come with me of course, and before we were allowed to move he just had to give me a guided tour of where all the controls were because I obviously haven’t been driving since about ten years before he was born.

The drive was actually good, it put the car in the top two. So we get back, I ask him to run some figures. He comes back with some paperwork, starts rattling off numbers. I say “this is no good, let me read it.” He hands me his stack of papers.

Schoolboy error (almost literally). On top is a couple of quotes with different options, below that is some glossy adverts, and below that… they’d profiled me. Every little snippet of info they could glean from initial contact (“likes big cats”) had been duly written down so he could go do some legwork to create conversation inroads to butter me up. There was like an A4 page full of printed notes. I think he realised his error but it was too late. That was the final straw, I didn’t buy a Mazda.

Hope you didn’t buy a Jag instead 🙈

🤣👌😁

I’ve got to say from.my experiences… I absolutely can’t abide main dealers and their BS.

Car  hyper market sort of place for me. No bollox, just a price in the window and that’s that. Ask which ones to test and they get them out of the lot and off we go, me driving. And the part ex for the shed I’m ditching is from the book, which they’re happy to show (they PX  was going to the auction, no doubt). High turnover, lower margin, no BS.

It’s very simple, and doesn’t just apply to car sales.

Anything offered after the main product is

a) largely irrelevent

b) massively overpriced. to recover margin

it started with shoe protecter for your Dunlop Green flash, and peaked with PPI. but it still lives and always will.

Puts me in mind of this.

I have always been very dubious of the paint protection stuff and would never pay for it to be done but it dies make a difference. The last car I bought obviously had had it done

This is the car that hasn’t been washed for 2 weeks and had been driven from one side of the country to another in a rain storm. It’s changed my mind, and it appears to stop black cars scratching so much.

as above though can get much cheaper 3rd party

Last second hand car I bought they tried to upsell all that stuff. I asked if the car had had any of those treatments before? As I wouldn’t be needing to refresh the 5year treatment after only 18 months.

johndoh

TBF, unless you are obsessed, people don’t really care – I like my cars but I still just wash them with a bucket and sponge – it’s a lump of metal, not your first-born.

You don’t need to be obsessed, to be honest. Just a few simple things can make quite a difference.

Get a half decent wash mitt rather than a sponge, & 2 buckets; one for fresh water & one for rinsing the mitt.
Rinse frequently, top up the mitt with fresh water (with whatever ‘cleaner’ stuff you want to use) and don’t swipe a massive load of crud from the bottom edges of the car then proceed to rub it over the rest of the paintwork.
I try to work ‘top down’ as much as possible to try & reduce dirt & grit being smeared all over the car.

It helps if one bucket is light (clean water) and one is dark (dirty water). Well, it does for me anyway – to help prevent me dunking into the wrong bucket. It’s quite an eye opener how dirty the water in the dirty bucket gets compared to how clean it remains in the clean bucket.
Sounds a bit lame/geeky, but takes no more effort really than just using one bucket.

Yeah, you can get special buckets with grit filters/separators etc. but I feel just by using 2 buckets you are already 90% there. And a wash mitt doesn’t seem to hang onto dirt the same way a sponge does & holds onto the water better so it doesn’t just pour out like it does with a sponge.

My Wife has a metallic black Ibiza – 12 plate, so 11 years old now & it has virtually no swirls or signs of that fine scratching you commonly see in black paint when the sun hits it.
It’s not perfect, but the paint definitely doesn’t look 11 years old.

Sorry – just realised this is massively off-topic.

TBF, unless you are obsessed, people don’t really care – I like my cars but I still just wash them with a bucket and sponge – it’s a lump of metal, not your first-born.

You don’t need to be obsessed, to be honest. Just a few simple things can make quite a difference.

Depends on my mood. My cars swing from washed, polished and the interior getting obsessively cleaned if I’m going to be spending hour after hour on the motorway.

At the other end of the spectrum I’ve had to remove soil from the boot/back seats with a shovel after a cold/wet winter of using it to take bikes to night rides a few times a week in between weekend tip runs. I cleaned it when the grass started to grow!

But importantly I’ve found there’s not much that can’t be resolved with elbow grease and some products. I bought Benoit the Battered Berlingo with 3 days MOT left, an interior that was both moldy from a water leak and smoke/nicotine stained (I’m imagining Galouise) and every panel had some sort of scratch or dent on it. After quite a bit of effort (and an MOT to make sure it was worthwhile bothering) he was an entirely passable work-van, and covid compliant because he had a soft top 😁.

Basically if you want to spend a fortune on products and 2 buckets then all power to you, but unless you’re using a 99p yellow sponge, alkaline cleaner and not hosing the dirt off first then pretty much anything is solvable or can be hidden under a couple of coats of wax.